It's sad that I'm having to post this, but...
...what's going on with the US educational system?
More than half the kids in my classes (I'm a high school junior) can hardly pronounce words out of our text books.
And I'm not talking about vocabulary words either.
I hate to say it, but my high school is filled with utter idiots.
Is it just around my area, or is it all over the country? Am I too smart or something? Maybe they left their brains on their bedside table, or on their dresser.
I just don't know.

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"It's not about winning or loosing, but first is better than third."

It was like this when I was in elementary school. Granted, my pronunciation of words is pretty horrible, but my reading level has always been high. Now that I'm in college, I'm left wondering how a lot of people around me managed to graduate from high school. Their math/English skills aren't that great, tbh.

It's funny, well not really, that those same folks can no doubt text speak and spell like crazy. I have met a lot of young folks that even carrying on a conversation is a chore for them. It is really sad.

It's not going on much at all in my area. But it depends on what you mean. We have a strong 'tracking' system here (that has its own problems, for sure), that offers many different levels of classes. So there are students not doing really well in school, or what they are learning is kind of slower. Sometimes that can be shocking, yes.

I think there are always going to be kids who don't (or can't) take education as seriously as folks might like.

Are y'all talking about whole schools where this is a problem? If that's the question, then it's definitely not happening in my local area. I can think of some bad schools nearby, however (private and public).

It seems to break down by money or by politics here, and not always both together. Some families are kind of set on not liking challenging education, seriously. That surprises me, but they are very stubborn about it! If we still had apprenticeships or more farms where I live, it wouldn't be a problem like it is in more 'modern' times. The kids I'm thinking of end up not learning any skills that earn a living.

I have taught developmental English at the college level. The lowest college level. Students need to pass my class, then pass another class just to get into college composition. Over 70% of graduating high school students in this particular city did not test into college level English courses.

When I teach creative writing, I'm amazed at the lack of knowledge. Students don't know how to write dialogue. They don't know that you start a new paragraph for each new speaker. They don't know that you need those quotation mark "thingies." These are things I picked up intuitively just by READING a lot.

Whenever I see a student who has tolerable mastery of the English language, mechanics, syntax, spelling, and grammar, I become quite elated. It's rare. Very rare. I don't know why it's happening. I don't put this on the teachers because honestly? I think they all have their hands tied in regard to what they're able to do in a classroom. I think they have to deal with a lot of bureaucratic BS.

To the OP (Snowball) what kind of reading and assignments do you do in class? For me, English classes meant reading a few books across the semester, taking tests on material inside, and usually responding to the text (opinion, critical theory, reader response, etc). Do you feel the work is too easy for you?

It's been years since I've been in a high school classroom. I have no idea what happens there now in regard to English.

It's partly the texting culture I believe. What I have seen in the past years is that students coming to college are increasingly lack basic writing skills (and many other skills as well). And I'm not talking about creative writing classes, just regular academic fields.

I think there's always been a majority of people who aren't too interested in understanding the subtleties (or even the basics) of written or formal communication. In the past, though, these people had life options that didn't include graduating from high school. They could take over the family farm (which didn't use a lot of technology, back then), learn a trade, become a labourer, etc.

But we've decided that all of these jobs now need a high school education. I don't know if this is accurate or not, but it's what society seems to believe. So now, someone who's not academically inclined but who wants to be even a moderate 'success' has to graduate high school. Which means they have to either work really hard at something they don't care about, or the high schools have to simplify their graduation requirements in order to help these kids through. Since very few teenagers (or adults, for that matter) are willing to work hard at something they don't care about, the schools have had to sacrifice their standards. So now, there are students in high school who aren't functionally literate, but they're going to graduate anyway. Yay?

My older children went to school and learned how to memorize words before learning to sound them out. Crazy, eh? The theory is that most of our word recognition is based on memorization. They can't sound out new words.

My younger kids went to Montessori and learned how to sound things out first. They are brilliant when it comes to trying out new words.

I've spoken with some teachers about the poor quality of reading and writing, and I've seen the result of the current education system on the kiddos I used to work with. I had one teacher at a Montessori school give a child an exact copy of a test they were about to take with the correct answers circled. My thoughts are this, that schools have had to focus so exclusively on bullshit standardized testing that they no longer have time to teach children how to read and write with any sort of confidence. For those children who take to verbal skills naturally, no problem. Show them the basics and they'll do the rest themselves. But for those kiddos I worked with that were very math and numbers oriented, they couldn't read well enough to understand their homework, and in a couple of cases, could not read at all.